Rogueish
Beyoncé, Gaga, Heterosexism, Feminism and Other Things
12/17/11
So I’m in the middle of a Facebook debate with a friend of mine about Beyoncé that was basically provoked by this article, which he agrees with and has led him to broadly assert that Beyoncé “affirms heteronormative heterosexuality as the sole way for girls to assert their sexuality.” That seemed overly reductive to me, and we’ve been bantering back and forth about it. Figured I’d rather compile what I wrote somewhere easier for me to locate than someone else’s Facebook wall. However, I’d be interested in hearing the rest of y’all weigh in on this. Is B thoroughly tied into heteronormativity? Moreso than your average pop or R&B star? Less so? Should she really be, as the article suggests, embracing Gaga-esque positions in her music?
Robin James has written a bunch of great stuff about pop, gender, and race, and Beyoncé specifically, and this post on “Single Ladies” even more specifically.
Shakira to fight Arizona immigration law →
04/28/10
Who wrote SB1070? White supremacists.
Who opposes it? Shakira!
It couldn’t be more crystal clear what side you should be on.
04/05/10
Slightly mystified by how stupid Melissa Harris-Lacewell is. Well, it’s not quite that she’s stupid; it’s that she uses fundamentally right-wing arguments in support of nominally left-wing positions. First it was her Schmittian state-worship in service of an opportunistic argument that the teabaggers are “seditious”; now she’s claiming Michael Steele is an incompetent who was only hired because he’s black. Way to go, MHL, channeling that other MSNBC contributor, Pat Buchanan.
01/29/10
The Daily Show on Chris Matthews. “Sorry John, I just can’t forget that you’re Jewish.”
01/28/10
Chris Matthews is getting a certain amount of stick for saying that he “forgot [Obama] was black for an hour” during the State of the Union, but this strikes me as an unusually honest remark about race in the US, implying as it does that, all the rest of the time, he is consciously aware that Obama is black.
